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Provided by the compucert Hey! This isn't Snappy! It's merely a pretender to her throne!
Find the article here:Snappy, the 20lb dumped Ninja turtle who is terrorising a pond
Last updated at 16:29pm on 27th September 2007
He was just a baby turtle when he was released from captivity 20 years ago.
Now he has emerged from the water as a 20lb monster - after munching his way through two decades of pond life.
The alligator snapping turtle has grown into a massive beast after feeding on fish and unsuspecting ducklings.
Lurking in the depths he devoured young birds, using his razor-sharp beak to drag victims under water to drown and eat them.
But due to his huge size and insatiable appetite, wardens at Caldicot Country Park in South Wales have now deemed the ferocious reptile a risk to human visitors - and moved him to a new home.
Snappy is though to be a legacy of the Mutant Ninja Turtles show which becamehugely popular in the late 1980s.
Young fans pestered parents to buy them as pets, only to release them into the wild when the creatures had outgrown the cute stage.
Thanks to warmer temperatures and a seemingly unlimited food supply, he has grown to a size bordering on mutant himself.
At 29 inches in length, Snappy is believed to be the biggest specimen of his kind outside of the Mississippi where snapping turtles normally live.
Head warden at the park, Denis Manning, said: "He is king of the pond and will eat anything he fancies - nothing is safe when Snappy is around.
"I first saw him about 17 years ago and he would have been a tiddler when he was first put in.
"Turtles became the in-thing during the Ninja Turtles TV series and films.
"But people either got bored with them or they couldn't cope when they outgrew their tanks."
Snappy has outgrown his pond after gobbling up everything in his tracks and is moving to a tortoise and turtle charity who have found him a new home at a sanctuary in West Wales.
Mr Manning said: "In some ways I'll be sorry to see him go - he's become a local character
"He spends most of his time in the depths of the pond but I often saw him feeding on the surface.
"He eats anything but he has a particular fondness for ducklings.
"He is like a vicious submarine. He'll just float under the surface of the water and then jump up to take the birds off the top."Visitors who don't know about him have reported seeing a dustbin lid moving by the pond because that's what he looks like."
Alligator snapping turtles are found throughout the Southern states of America where they thrive in the warm humid conditions and can live to be 150 years old.
But reptile lovers say Snappy is good natured - as long as he's got plenty of food available.
Andy Highfield, Director of the Tortoise Trust in the UK said: "He would have been bought as a baby from a pet shop when he was probably just two or three inches long.
"But as he got bigger his owners couldn't cope with him and must have dumped him in the pond.
"We are arranging for him to be collected and checked over by a vet before he moves into his new home."
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